


I got new love, new skin (to wrap myself in)

by ImberReader



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: But like... Only in an echo, But not as stupid as they could be, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Idiots in Love, Implied Rivals to Lovers, Lots of Touching, Pining, So Much Touching, probably, sports AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:21:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26500576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImberReader/pseuds/ImberReader
Summary: It starts like this:A touch to infuriate, a touch to support, a touch to love.(But that's what it was all along, wasn't it?)
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 20
Kudos: 92





	I got new love, new skin (to wrap myself in)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [letters2the0](https://archiveofourown.org/users/letters2the0/gifts).



> A prompt fill that grew beyond any sense or reason and has earned it's own spot. Though not really gift-worthy, but! |D 
> 
> "Tracing fingers over skin + Kitchen + To start a new habit" letters2the0 asked and I couldn't resist. <3
> 
> As always, much thanks to the bestest Beta [Roccolinde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roccolinde/pseuds/Roccolinde). 
> 
> Title from [New Skin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdOzbNnDhps) by VÉRITÉ, just because.

It starts like this:

It’s been three days since her game with Margaery and some unknown number had woken her up with a text of a screenshot of people discussing that of course the brute beat the delicate flower to dust. She blocked the number and deleted the text without even reading beyond the third line, but the sleep has been chased off and the sun is sneaking golden fingers above the horizon, so she rises to wring the stone in her chest until it yields. 

Not unusually, Jaime is down in the courts before her doing his warm up stretches, and she jogs past him without a glance because the last thing she wants to think about is the way power comes to him in sleek lines and deceptive ease.

Brienne does her own stretches and begins training, but it feels sloppy and her body jerks in response to her instincts and thoughts instead of the controlled fluidity she’s more used to having. At one point, she sends one of the tennis balls straight for Jaime’s head and he bats it down before she manages to shout a warning, which is somehow both a relief and a disappointment. She swings at the next ball with more force.

"Hey Stork," he calls, and she tries to ignore Jaime approaching her with intent and grace she really would pay to see dismantled, just fucking once. 

Her glower at the nickname feels like it’s doing her no favors, but she can't help it. He hasn't stopped calling her that since the unfortunate day she sunburned her legs, turning them that undelightful lobster - or stork - red and had to play a game, the color vivid against the stupid white of the uniform. (It hadn’t been the worst thing she had heard that day, by far, but she still would like to have left it within that day.)

"I really can't bear to watch anymore," he informs her, tossing her the ball, and she's so close to just _snarling_ at him. 

"Then don't look," she bites instead. 

"Believe me, I've tried," Jaime says and there's something wry and a little mocking in his face. If she was any more gullible, she'd almost think it was self-depreciating. But she isn't and she begins to turn away, unwilling to let him brighten his day by mocking her appearance.

And then she's snapping back to glare at him, when he speaks a moment later.

"Are you playing to win or to apologize?" he asks, tilting his chin up just so and looking at her through his unfairly long lashes. It looks like an almost exact copy of Cersei's subtler seduction looks, but this one doesn't even try to hide the sharpness and it's way too early for her armor to be impenetrable.

She doesn't owe him a response, but she gives it anyway. (As one always does when it comes to Lannisters.) "To win," she says and feels her nostrils flare a little.

"Then why do you apologize constantly?" he asks and steps into her space, menacing and golden like a midday sun in the middle of drought.

"With your posture, the way you hunch, how you hold your racket - all of it is just screaming 'I'm sorry you have to look at me, I'll make myself small'. It wasn’t like that last year. And I've seen you play angry, you’ve still got it." He moves around her and taps the back of her neck, her shoulder, her elbow, her wrist as he speaks. She straightens up automatically, adjusts her arm though her anger had already sprung her back ramrod straight, as if being an inch taller could pull her heart out of his maw's reach.

He looks satisfied almost, at the way she's towering over him now, and she doesn't want to tell him of Hyle and his buddies, doesn't want to speak of old scars that were opened up with a scalpel of cruelty.

"Play angry, if you must. But stop apologizing."

"Playing angry isn't my style," she tells him and sees the prisms in his eyes shift, catch light at an angle, almost like a hurt, before it settles. 

"Maybe it should be. No publicity is bad publicity and all that." 

They both know it's a lie, though Lannisters money have managed to make it as close to truth as can be. After all, he's still playing, despite the grave injury Aerys sustained. Still going for the stars, not caring if anyone says he bought them or beat them into submission.

But he isn't done with her either: "And your cool calculations obviously aren't very objective about yourself these days."

She wants to tell him that just because his default setting is egomaniac, doesn't mean a realistic vision of self is wrong but he is already leaving, tossing "see ya, Stork" over his shoulder.

She's left glaring at his retreating back and training furiously, she's left having him tap her shoulder or her elbow every morning when he passes to or from the court he’s training on, though there's no need anymore. Enough that when she goes back to Tarth for the summer, every morning seems to be missing something. 

And later, there isn't a pleasant little shiver racing beneath her skin where his tap slips down her arm in passing, almost like a caress.

There isn't.

***

It starts like this:

Jaime never looks _small_ , but he almost does so now, staring at the Mountain across the court as they approach. It's not the way the other man is both wider and taller, it's the way Cersei's machinations are there, breathing and twisting before him.

She's moving more hurriedly before she realizes, wading through the crowd that unwillingly parts for her, toward him and catches him just before he steps out. Her hand feels hot and clumsy and heavy, but she reaches out nonetheless.

She squeezes his shoulder, mouths "play angry" to him in passing and sees a flicker of surprise across his face, as if he isn't expecting her support or her understanding of the phrase now. As if she didn't stay up working herself to exhaustion by his side, just so he wouldn't be alone and she could convince him to go to the dorm when she did, too.

Then he smiles, an echo of his old, victorious grin, but somehow sharper for all the little space it is given, and nods.

He wins. (7-6 tiebreaker)

"Thanks," he tells her later. "I guess storks do bring good luck after all."

"Since when have you become so humble to credit a win to luck?" She rolls her eyes at him, sipping iced coffee as they look over the sea lapping at the pier, glittering in the afternoon sun.

"Oh, I do know how to give credit where it's due," he laughs, but it's soft and warm and he's like a sunset beach. Her heart constricts because none of this lingering warmth and last gilded wave crests are for her.

And yet, she continues to dig her toes in the sand, doing the same shoulder clasp gesture before each of his matches. Because that's what friends do. And they are friends, bros even, and leaning down to press a kiss to his cheek like a favor of a lady, like Sansa might to Margaery or Cersei used with Robert, isn't in the cards for her. She swallows the thought whole as swiftly as stork might a frog when it leaps into her mind.

Swallows it again and again with increasing frequency. Even when last week he stepped up to her as she wished him luck, eyes warm like green candles, and briefly grasped her arm as if to hold her, as if to pull her in and if she was any more foolish she would have wondered if he thought of it too. But she's not that foolish and she isn't left reeling with waves lapping at her feet, uncatchable no matter how she may want to hold onto them.

She isn't.

***

It starts like this:

It feels fresh and tender, like first leaves unfurling, this _shift_ between them, but with every kiss and smile, every morning spent watching the sun competing with her fingers in a quest to cover his skin with tender touches, her faith that it will endure and reach toward the sky becomes stronger.

It had started long before either of them thought it had, never ends and starts each day anew still, something new and something old bleeding together into a color that shifts and grows more vast with a thousand little things.

"Did you ever notice how we came up with all these ridiculous reasons to touch each other?" he asks her that morning as she's making breakfast and he's just set their cups of coffee on the table.

"What do you mean?" She is a little distracted by his fingers stroking up and down her bare arm, but she doubts she'd guess at his meaning even otherwise.

"The taps, the good luck wishes, the way I'd hand you coffee and brush fingers against yours, shoulder bumps in the hallway, the way we high five with only each other… All of these, just so we could touch for one moment."

"I wished you luck earnestly and with no ulterior motive," she defends, but it sounds a little thin even, or especially, to her ears. "Well, I waited for it every time with that intent, so."

She'd argue about the taps, but he's already confessed to calling her stork because he couldn't stop thinking about her legs to point they might as well be permanently painted red in his vision and that Stormlanders consider the birds sacred still, a blessing to any household.

"You are not a Stormlander," she had laughed, oddly pleased he knew this of her home region. 

"Never let it be said I don't appreciate learning some truths," Jaime had told her, between pressing soft kisses to her knuckles and then her mouth.

There had been so much tenderness and reverence in the gesture, and just a touch of teasing in his eyes, like she truly was both his blessing and his lucky charm. (If there is any man that'd flirt with his luck as much as danger, then it's Jaime)

She isn't so foolish to think it is true, but she knows enough that he does believe it, with his whole heart. And that's enough for her.

"Where are you going with this?" Because Jaime loves talking just for sake of talking, has for years now that he knows he's allowed to, just to unravel his thoughts,but there's intent in his eyes and his fingers, ghosting up and down and around her arm and then her back, still.

"We should start new touching habits, just because we can." 

"Like what?" She can’t say she’s not curious and warmed by the thought all at once, these little things he wants to build their life with. Things she hadn’t thought she wanted, sometimes, but finish that sloppy, once-impossible blueprint of a dream life perfectly. 

"We could make room for it in our lunch breaks. Do you know how often I wanted to kiss you when we ate lunch together?" She doesn’t, but she can estimate, based on her own experiences and it’s a number she doesn’t quite want to confess to.

Luckily, that’s not Jaime’s goal. He stands up and steps behind her, wraps arms around her waist and rests his chin on her shoulder. A sense of content radiates from him, like he’s somehow a cat that has found his perfect sunbeam to nap in.

"We owe it to our past selves, you know. And future ones, too." 

Only Jaime would turn a suggestion to lazily make out at lunch as a daily routine into something poetic and be completely serious about it. The shift from relaxed contention to something more trickles in the little space left between their bodies. 

"And this is good, too. Just me getting touch you while you cook." He brushes her hair a little to the side and presses a little kiss to the back of her neck, making her shiver as if she’s been thrown from cold water straight into the sun - it’s still _so much_. She doesn’t think it’ll ever be truly less, even if it’s different.

"You're just saying so you don't have to prepare food," Brienne says instead, because it’s not the words that do the talking between them, half the time. 

"Oh no, not at all. I'm all for being touch appreciated, any time." His grin is audible and she feels it press against her shoulder where he’s mouthing kisses now, having slid the strap of her tank top down. 

"I think we should appreciate the breakfast now." Because gods know if they don’t, it’ll be a while before they return to thoughts of food. She extracts herself from his arms, much to his soft protesting, and begins plating the food.

"What about later?" He is smirking, eyebrow quirked, and his eyes are full of light. Fondness bubbles in her chest, because there was a time when she hadn’t known he was capable of being this plainly open and joyful. When he hadn’t known. She treasures evidence of the shift, like every beautiful sunrise.

"Maybe there are few habits I'd like to establish, too," she smiles and cups his cheek briefly before placing a kiss on his cheekbone. 

After all, there is time for it, time for them.

**Author's Note:**

> So much for my quiet "I am never going to write Sports AU"... But then again, let's be real, this _doesn't_ qualify.


End file.
